IT is wild strawberry time in lower Canada. The fields are carpeted with
them and the fern-covered rocks hold each a little garden where the red
berries hang over the water like rubies in a setting of clustered leaves.
The birds are feasting royally and I walk along the edges of the meadows,
gathering handfuls of the ripe fruit. No one is at home any more. When
I stop at a house the women have all gone a-berrying. Thousands of
quarts go off to the markets, or are cooked here into jellies and jam,
for the delicacy of the winter is wild strawberry preserve. I had it
every time I went out to tea. Now they give me strawberry shortcake and,
O how good it is! No garden fruit can compare, in sweetness or perfume,
with the little wild berry of the fields.
Not all my friends go berrying every day, however. Yesterday I was
kneeling on the dock busy washing my clothes, when a heavily laden motor
boat, with a row boat in tow, rounded the point and headed for the
island. In it were Mary Blake, Mrs. Swanson, Anna Jackson, and Jean
Foret. Rose Beaulac and Granny Drapeau sat in the little boat behind and
all space not filled by women of ample build, was piled high with pails
and baskets.
“We’ve come to spend the day,” they hailed me. “Don’t get scared, we’ve
brought our dinners along.”
“Dinner or no dinner, I am glad to see you,” I called back, waving an
apron in welcome.
“We knew this would be our last chance to have a visit with you before
the campers come, so we’ve come to have a picnic.”
Ah! What a happy, friendly day! These women—busy heads of households,
women of affairs—laid aside their cares, forgot their responsibilities
and enjoyed their party with the simplicity of children. And how good
was the chicken, brought already cooked in a shining pail, and the cakes
and pies in the baskets! Mrs. Swanson had journeyed in to Sark to buy
candy, and all that the store there boasted was the dear old candy of our
childhood, little chocolate boys and girls and rabbits, sugar hearts with
mottoes, jaw-breakers and pep’mint sticks.
We sat long at the big table on the porch. We talked and talked, or,
rather, they talked; I listened, marking the shrewdness of their
deductions, the keenness of their comment, the kindliness of their
judgments. I heard all about the fine new store at Frontenac and the
bargains one and another had found. They described the magnificence of
the yearly celebration there when the Orangemen walk in procession. They
told me that this year Joey Trueman, the storekeeper, had not scrupled to
set off a whole twenty-three dollars’ worth of fireworks by way of
advertisement.
We explored the scant five acres of the island, peeping in at the doors
of the little summer sleeping shacks, all swept and furnished for the
campers, and then, in the pleasant languor of the afternoon, I brought
out my stack of photographs and told all about my homefolk.
For I too have formed the photo-displaying habit of this neighborhood, a
friendly, kindly custom that makes one free at once of the home and all
the family. I have never gone visiting here without being at once
presented with the album. Many a time has my hostess hurried in from the
kitchen to ask: “Has Miss X. seen the pictures yet?”
Big, unmercifully true-to-life crayon likenesses of grandparents stare
down from all the parlor walls—ancestral portraits. There are
photographs of all the brides and grooms and babies, snapshots of sons
fighting “somewhere in France,” of daughters gone out to make homes of
their own on the far-off frontier, and there are the faces of those lying
safe under the cedars in the little graveyards close at home. I have
heard the life stories of all, and so it seems quite natural for me to
hand out my pictures too.
As evening drew on and milking time approached, my guests gathered
together pails and baskets and, as we walked single file along the trail
to the dock, I tried to say something of what lies in my heart about all
the kindness they had shown me in the year gone by, but the lump that
rose in my throat choked back the words. They climbed into their boats,
that sank to the gunwales under their weight, and I watched them away
across the purple water.
My holiday is over. In a very few weeks I must go back to the city and
take up my work—the same, yet never again to be the same. Here in the
quiet of the woods I am trying to take stock of all that this year has
done for me.
It has given me health. I have forgotten all about jerking nerves and
aching muscles. I sleep all night like a stone; I eat plain food with
relish; I walk and row mile after mile; I work rejoicing in my strength
and glad to be alive.
There has been also the renewing of my mind, for my standards of values
are changed. Things that once were of supreme importance seem now the
veriest trifles. Things that once I took for granted, believing them the
common due of mankind—like air and sunshine, warm fires and the kind
faces of friends—are now the most valuable things in the world. What I
have learned here of the life of birds and beasts, of insects and trees
are the veriest primer facts of science to the naturalist—to me they are
inestimably precious, the possessions of my mind, for, like Chicken
Little, “I saw them with my eyes, and heard them with my ears.” And I
shall carry away a gallery of mind-pictures to be a solace and
refreshment through all the years to come.
The camp is ready for its owner. I have spent many hours in cleaning,
arranging, replacing, that she may find all as she left it ten months
ago. The island lies neat and fair in the sunshine, reminding me of a
good child that has been washed and dressed and seated on the doorstep to
wait for company. Never have the woods looked so fair to me, or the wide
lake, where the dragonflies are hawking to and fro over the water, so
beautiful.
This is dragonfly season. Millions of them are darting through the
air—great green and brown ones with a wing-spread of three to four
inches; wee blue ones, like lances of sapphire light; little inch-long
yellow ones, and beautiful, rusty red.
To-day I spent three hours on the dock watching one make that wonderful
transition from the life amphibious to the life of the air. Noon came
and went, food was forgotten while that miracle unfolded there before my
very eyes.
I was tying the boat, when I saw what looked like a very large spider,
crawling up from the water and out on a board. It moved with such effort
and seemed so weak that I was tempted to put it out of its pain. But if
I have learned nothing else in all these months in the woods, I have
thoroughly learned to keep hands off the processes of nature. Too often
have I seen my well-meant attempts to help things along end in disaster.
So I gave the creature another glance and prepared to go about my
business, when I noticed a slit in its humped back, and a head with
great, dull beads of eyes pushing out through the opening. Then I sat
down to watch, for I realized that this was birth and not death.
Very slowly the head emerged and the eyes began to glow like lamps of
emerald light. A shapeless, pulpy body came working out and two feeble
legs pushed forth and began groping for a firm hold. They fastened on
the board and then, little by little and ever so slowly, the whole insect
struggled out, and lay weak, almost inanimate, beside the empty case that
had held it prisoner so long.
Two crumpled lumps on either side began to unfurl and show as wings. The
long abdomen, curled round and under, like a snail-shell, began to uncurl
and change to brilliant green, while drops of clear moisture gathered on
its enameled sides and dripped from its tip. The transparent membrane of
the wings, now held stiffly erect, began to show rainbow colors, as they
fanned slowly in the warm air, and, at last, nearly three hours after the
creature had crept out of the water, the great dragon-fly stood free,
beside its cast-off body lying on the dock. And
“Because the membraned wings,
So wonderful, so wide,
So sun-suffused, were things
Like soul and nought beside.”
Certain stupendous phrases rose in my mind and kept sounding through my
thoughts.
“Behold, I show you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all
be changed.”
There it stood, that living jewel, growing every moment more strong, more
exquisite, waiting perhaps for some trumpet call of its life. Suddenly
it stiffened, the great wings shot out horizontally, and with one joyous,
upward bound, away it flashed, an embodied triumph, out across the
shining water, straight up into the glory of the sun.
When I came to myself I was standing a tiptoe gazing up after it, my
breath was coming in gasps and I heard my own voice saying: “It is sown
in weakness, it is raised in power. . . . Thanks be to God, which giveth
us the victory.”
Then, standing there under those trees, clothed in their new green and
upspringing to the sky, and beside the lake, where the young ferns troop
down to the water’s edge, valiant little armies with banners, there came
to me one of those strange flashes of understanding, that pierce for an
instant the thick dullness of our minds, and give us a glimpse of the
meaning of this life we live in blindness here.
I had seen those woods, all bare and dead, rise triumphant in a glorious
spring. I had seen that lake grow dark and still and lie icebound
through the strange sleep of winter. Its water now lay rippling in the
sun.
Since my coming to Many Islands, one year ago, the Great War has broken
forth, civilization has seemed to die, and the hearts of half the world
have gone down into a grave.
But even to me has come the echo of the Great Voice that spoke to John,
as he stood gazing on a new heaven and new earth:
“I am the beginning and the end,” it said. “Behold I make all things
new.”